Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Terrorists, hackers, and journalists. According to a recent Guardian article covering new Snowden documents, British spy agency GCHQ considers all of these individuals threats—various levels of threats, but threats nonetheless. One intelligence report goes so far as to say, "Of specific concern are 'investigative journalists' who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest."

The National Academy of Sciences has released Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence: Technical Options, a report on technical solutions to the problem of bulk collection. The report, which was made public on January 15, was the result of Barack Obama's Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD 28). PPD 28 mandated an assessment of “the feasibility of creating software that would allow the Intelligence Community more easily to conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection.”

PEN America published a report this week summarizing the findings from a recent survey of 772 writers around the world on questions of surveillance and self-censorship. The report, entitled "Global Chilling: The Impact of Mass Surveillance on International Writers," builds upon a late 2013 survey of more than 500 US-based writers conducted by the organization.

The latest survey found that writers living in liberal democratic countries "have begun to engage in self-censorship at levels approaching those seen in non-democratic countries, indicating that mass surveillance has badly shaken writers' faith that democratic governments will respect their rights to privacy and freedom of expression, and that—because of pervasive surveillance—writers are concerned that expressing certain views even privately or researching certain topics may lead to negative consequences."

EFF was suing the NSA before it was cool. We filed our first lawsuit against the NSA for mass spyingin 2008, after the NSA butted into our lawsuit against AT&T for helping the NSA do mass spying. We’ve also been doing Freedom of Information lawsuits trying to ensure you know what the NSA is up to for many years before that. But when it comes to fighting unconstitutional spying, the more the merrier. And 2014 was awfully merry: litigation challenging NSA surveillance moved forward in multiple cases, giving the government plenty of time to demonstrate exactly how outrageous its arguments in defense of mass spying are.

After a banner year for shedding light on the NSA’s secret surveillance programs in 2013, the pace of disclosures in 2014—both from whistleblowers and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits—slowed significantly.

But that’s not because all the secrets of NSA surveillance have been revealed.